Considering the Real-Time User Experience as an Engagement Strategy

Editor's Note: Today's post is by Rob Garner, Vice President of Strategy at iCrossing, a global digital marketing agency.

When
you stop and think about it, Internet marketers who advocate for
relevant and authentic experiences are actually advocating for the
consumer on behalf of your business, as well as the searcher, the
social-network user, and their audience in general.

Traditionally,
the user experience in Internet marketing design tends to apply toward
the website experience in a “top-down” approach, meaning that site users
enter the site from the home page and work their way through the site.

But
the reality is that the user experience begins before they enter the
website, from wherever they search or wherever they seek information
outside of your owned assets. A real-time search and social mind-set
takes part of the experience to the user, in addition to providing a
basis for the audience to interact with your own assets, and this also
provides a function of customer relationship management (CRM).

Fundamentally
viewing real-time marketing in this way will help shape your overall
approach and help guide everything you do to build a real-time method of
interacting online. Thinking about the search and social user
experience also changes when viewed in terms of engagement. Engagement
is as much about advocating for a searcher or network audience as it is
about optimization. By advocating for the searcher or user, you must
perform market research and keyword research and create personas with
the search experience in mind. You must seek them out in a meaningful
and non-intrusive way, and you must do so through tools and through real
human interaction.

Website
and network experiences may also be thought of as “relational” in the
sense that they are starting from the “outside in” as well.

Outside
in means that the user experience starts before your audience enters
your site or social space. With an overwhelming majority of Internet
users utilizing search and social networks, this experience must become
foundational to your marketing strategy. The challenge for
user-experience groups is rooted in the question about “what is being
done for a person entering your site from a search engine or social
network,” especially when this initiating experience may begin with 20
to 75 percent of all site traffic and drills down into every part of the
site. If your design does not address this problem, then the full
picture has not been considered for user experience.

Conversely,
the user experience must also be considered completely off-site and
off-asset, because a large part of the experience is in social spaces
not owned but you or your business. Ultimately, real-time
user-experience strategy is about solving a problem for individuals,
solving a problem for your audience as a whole, or satisfying search
intent in some way. It goes beyond real-time content and into real-time
interaction and participation.

If
the solution does not present itself and become self-evident to the
consumer at the point of consumption, then real-time interaction on
behalf of your business can also provide an alternative form of
relevancy to the audience experience. The difference is that the
experience requires a human and conversational touch, while still
solving a query intention or a problem.

Again,
this is major strategic consideration and retooling of marketing
philosophy, and even an understanding of “selling in” this concept may
be required to enable your organization to make the transition to
real-time marketing in a world of search and social.